Bette’s Stories

I gathered these stories in late 2014 with the intention of surprising my mother with a book when we celebrated her 90th birthday. She died a few months short of that mark, sapping me of the energy to finish the project. Now I feel the urgency once again to share her work with others.

My mother began writing these stories in the 1980s and revised them over several decades. Some were published in literary magazines, but most have been read by just a handful of close friends. With the help of colleagues and my son, I’ve lightly edited three of her stories and prepared them for publication. I plan to continue this process and release the rest in the months ahead.

My mother’s stories are fictional, but she thought of them as a form of memoir. Although many of the characters and events are invented, the settings and situations draw heavily on her experience. Each tale provides a window into her life’s journey, from a Depression-era childhood in small-town New England, to city life post-college, and to family and work life in the second half of the 20th century.

These stories evoke the gap between innocence and experience and the accidents that propel us from one to the other. Relationships formed by blood, affection, and chance encounters form the core of these tales. Together they create a portrait of a woman — from childhood to old age — coming to understand some uncomfortable truths about her world.

Nicole Fauteux